The crowd
group · 3 works · 3 mentions · 8 anchored passages
the multitude · the crowd · the throng · the herd · the many · the mob · the people · the vulgar
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
The general mass of people whose company and approval Seneca counsels avoiding as corrupting.
The crowd.
The company of many is harmful:
You must of necessity either imitate them or hate them.
On the Happy Life
The undifferentiated mass of people whose opinions and imitative behavior Seneca warns against as a guide to the happy life.
But as it is, the people stand opposed to reason, the champions of their own undoing.
When the happy life is in question, there is no reason for you to answer me in the manner of a division of the senate:
And the more numerous and greater they are, the smaller is the man and the slave of the more masters, whom the crowd calls happy.
De Carnis Resurrectione
The common people, who mock belief in resurrection while still honoring the dead with funeral feasts.
but the crowd mocks, supposing that nothing remains after death.
" But when they say, "What is dead is dead," and "Live while you live," and "After death all things end, even death itself" — then I shall remember both that the heart of the crowd is accounted ash by God, and that the very wisdom of the world is pronounced foolishness.